Worth Reading: Data journalism – a new paradigm in storytelling

JAMAICA – Some months ago, an editorial by the Chicago Tribune (one of the top five newspapers in the United States) on Jamaica’s debt crisis evoked a variety of responses from local commentators and leaders, spanning the political spectrum. The responses ranged from the dismissive to the defensive, casting the article as either sloppy journalism or deliberate mischief to discredit the stewardship of current and previous administrations.

It is interesting to observe that in all of the responses (with perhaps, the notable exception of Keith Collister’s comparative country analysis of January 9), few attempted to provide a truly analytic, evidence-based examination of Jamaica’s debt status as the basis for investigating, commenting on, and providing the kind of insight that not only illuminates but makes the issue interesting and accessible to a wide cross section of consumers.

This is what a new emerging paradigm in investigative journalism demands. Data journalism, a recently popular label, describes a modern approach to storytelling that makes use of the overwhelming abundance of sources of publicly accessible, authoritative data, together with compelling new tools and techniques for data visualisation and analytics. More